Firefox + Plugins are the life saving combos, you second that right ? Well firefox is famous today more than its old variants like Internet explorer 😛 It is due to the reason that it gives you the chance to be yourself and modify stuff the way you want it. However the all time bundled Internet Explorer could not gather the same love and same sort of dedication from the community. So thereby sending a message that it is the community which decides the fate of a program, software or application.
Certainly we are not here to compare IE with firefox or to tell you how bad developers think IE is, instead I am gonna give you a list of firefox plugins which gonna make your life little easy which developing those super web applications. You probably are using some of them already and some of you might have better opinions or suggestions. There are quite a few which I might miss out, cause the list is huge and the requirement cannot be confined to this one post, so lets discuss the ones which I think are super necessary, rest you can add your suggestions in the comments 🙂
1. Firebug
I bet you cannot breathe without this on the internet if you are developer. It not only gives you a tremendous power to debug CSS, javascript realtime but also lets you understand the structure of a docment. It gives you all information regarding a webpage, what does it load, how much time did it takes to pull all the resources etc. You can change the CSS realtime , without having to switch on from browser to text editor, when you are done just change that bit finally into the file and save 🙂 You gotta explore that more, the more you do the better it goes.
This plugin is missed by many famous blog posts, but let me tell you this plugin is a life saver. My manager recommends me everytime to use this plugin, whenever I get stuck into something. It is little cumbersome to use this at first because the output you getting may contain lots of data which is just scrap for you. But the real thing which you are looking for is, still with in the results. It is good to use when you are debuging Ajax requests or what happened when you did something on particular page, what request was sent to the servers etc.
This plugin is another great tool in its own. It lets you play around with CSS, disables CSS and JS files individually on a webpage. It also lets you change the size for the browser to see how it would look on a small screen or a larger screen. It highlights the elements wise information as you require. And this one has got lot more options, just explore and get benefited.
4. JRuler (not a firefox plugin though)
An awesome plugin to measure anything on the screen. The best thing about this plugin is that you can measure stuff even outside the browser. Suppose you open an image prototype of a web design in Windows Image viewer then that way the plugins inside firefox will not work, so JRuler gives you facility to measure just anything anywhere on the screen. Really tidy & small plugin, you surely gonna love it.
5. ColorZilla
Already reviewed about this plugin here in the post, its another awesome plugin which lets you grab the color of just anything on a webpage or inside the browser window.
6. Fireshot
It is a nice tool to take screenshots of a webpage, I think that explains all and its more useful for the testing guys 😛
7. FireFtp
Really an old plugin and its an awesome tool. It lets you connect to your server via FTP within the firefox. Isnt that amazing ? Imagine how hard is to develop such a plugin which works seamlessly within your browser. You can upload, download files and can event edit them. It supports multiple accounts as well.
8. IE Tab
This plugin lets you open an IE tab within firefox. That way you do not have to open a new window for IE. You can view how your site would look in IE and can revert back into normal life with firefox 😛
These are all I would recommend you to atleast get started with the web development. There are blogs or sites which give you 30 plugins for firefox, 20 plugins etc. But seriously you do not require all of them. You require what you need. Use the ones you like and do not overwhelm your firefox browser. This is what I will recommend, rest you the best to decide 🙂
Stay Digified !!
Sachin Khosla
